13APR2007 "The rains started, but we're glad we went anyway..."

Yesterday, the rainy season started. No warning, no transition period; just stiflingly hot and sunny one day and rainy the next. It rained on and off all day on Friday and it has been raining non-stop for the past 24 hours. Three things happened as soon as the rain started: the temperature dropped 15 degrees, a pungent sour smell enveloped the whole town, and an infestation of flying ants emerged from the soil. I mean literally, within hours of the rain starting, our tile floor was covered with hundreds of wriggling, dying ants. I wonder if it will go on like this until the end of the rains? At least we have made it through the hottest part of the year and now have some green months to look forward to.

Before the rains began, we had planned to go for a long bike ride after work on Friday. The rain stopped briefly at about 5pm and, ever optimistic, we decided to go for it. We biked to the northern edge of the creek and followed it inland, to the west. To get to the creek, we had to bike through some villages and up and down some steep rocky paths. We finally emerged at the creek on a mudflat that is exposed at low tide, but covered during high tide. We were riding at neap tide, which means the lowest high-tides of the moon. The flats were relatively dry (except for water from the recent rains) because the highest tides hadn’t reached that point for the last week or so. We followed a well used footpath up the creek, through mudflats and mangrove forests, with cliffs rising on our right which then opening up to foothills. The hills were decorated with giant baobab trees, which made stunning silhouettes in the fading sunlight. The narrow single-track was sandy in parts and slippery in parts, especially when the path was covered with a carpet of wet mangrove sticks. Dozens of crabs living in the mud would scurry back to their holes as whichever biker was in front zipped around the corner, surprising them. Dugout canoes were tied to mangrove stumps waiting for the high tide to meet them and villages spotted the fertile land between the hills and the mudflats.

We stopped to take in a view of the creek as it opened up and were stunned by a brilliant rainbow in the eastern sky arching halfway across the creek created by the sun setting in the west. Just as we turned around to make our way back, it started to rain and it kept up a steady drumming all the way home. But the west was still clear and when we looked again the rainbow completed its arch from the south side of the creek (on our right), to the foothills in the north (on our left). It was one of the clearest and most brilliant rainbows I have ever seen.